One of the greatest novels of the 20^th-century follows the disintegration of former Southern aristocrats looked at in four different ways.  The Sound and the Fury is considered William Faulkner’s greatest novel, following members of the Compson family over roughly 30 years in which the once great aristocratic Southern family breaks down from within and influence socially.

The book begins with man-child Benjamin “Benjy” Compson remembering various incidents over the previous 30 years from his first memory of his sister Caddy climbing a tree, his name being changed after his family learned he was mentally handicapped, the marriage and divorce of Caddy, and his castration all while going around his family’s property in April 1928.  The second section was of Quentin Compson, skipping classes during a day of his freshman year at Harvard in 1910 and wandering Cambridge, Massachusetts thinking about death and his family’s estrangement from his sister Caddy before committing suicide.  The third section followed a day in the life of Jason Compson who must take care of his hypochondriac mother and Benjy along with his niece, Caddy’s daughter Quentin.  Working at a hardware store to make ends meet while stealing the money his sister sends to Quentin, Jason has to deal with people who used to lookup to his family and with black people who irritate the very racist head of the Compson family.  The four section follows several people on Easter Sunday 1928 as the black servants take care of Benjy and gets for the Compsons while Jason finds out that Quentin as runaway with all the money in the house, which includes the money he stole from her and his life savings.  After failing to find Quentin, Jason returns to town to calm down Benjy who is having a fit due to his routine being changed.

In constructing this book, Faulkner employed four different narrative styles for each section.  Benjy’s section was highly disjointed narrative with numerous time leaps as he goes about his day.  Quentin’s section was of an unreliable stream of consciousness narrator with a deteriorating state of mind, which after Benjy’s section makes the reader want to give up the book.  Jason’s section is a straightforward first-person narrative style with the fourth and final section being a third person omniscient point-of-view.  While one appreciates Faulkner’s amazing work in producing this novel, the first two sections are so all over the place that one wonders why this book was even written and only during the last two sections do readers understand about how the Compson family’s fortunes have fallen collectively and individually.

The Sound and the Fury is overall a nice novel, however the first two sections of William Faulkner’s great literally derails interest and only those that stick with the book learn in the later half what is going on with any clarity.  I would suggest reading another Faulkner work before this if you are a first-time reader of his work like I was because unless you’re dedicated you might just quit.

Light in August  is the final book in my Faulkner set and one, in some ways, grander in scope than the previous volumes.

Unlike As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury this story is not beholden to one family. We follow a daisy chain from character to character in narrative that  incorporates all the themes Faulkner had been writing about in the other novels in this set: sex, family, piety, church, small towns, long roads and racism.

We start with Lena Grove, walking across states to find Lucas Burch the fled father of her unborn child, she finds her way to Byron Bunch instead who unwittingly informs her of the father's presence, he now going by the name Joe Brown and rooming with Joe Christmas in a shed behind the house of Joanna Burden. Bunch also seeks the advice of disgrace former minister Gail Hightower.

Reading Faulkner is like visiting a friend in their small hometown diner, where everyone has a story that goes back generations, colored by who is telling it. The story itself moves along incrementally as we get one step further then leap four decades back. We learn about Hightower's family in the civil war, how the Burden family came to Jefferson and why they had been seen with suspicion, and so on.

The backgrounds always brought me back to the James Joyce quote, "History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Fate and history seem always to be closely tied in Faulkner's work. You aren't necessarily doomed by your history, but it is going to come up and there are not a lot of cheery endings.

See: Joe Christmas. He fought against his ambiguous racial background - though he usually passes for a foreigner its believed by him and his grandfather that he is part black, which others tend "discover" when he has broken the law - as well as an exceptionally cruel stepfather. Early accounts portray him seem something of a man's man: quiet, tough, hard working, keeps to himself. He sees himself that way too, mostly after his adoption. In the orphanage the race question made him an outcast, but he still sough comfort from other children, after a few years of abuse he's been made hard and is confused and angered by sympathy and - perhaps more appropriately - religion.

 Race itself could launch a thousand essays, particularly on this novel. Christmas's relationship to his ambiguous heritage and how he uses it to punish others is particularly fertile ground and the way language turns after the murder and it starts to circulate that he is part black. It wasn't merely Jim Crow, the legacy of slavery and the subjugation of an entire race was a legacy that lived on in the south and throughout the country.

The south in this novel, and Faulkner's others, appears like a frontier the country skipped over. Nothing is new here, the land has been settled and the few new arrivals are treated with suspicion and malice - see Hightower and especially Burden. Still, there remains an atmosphere of cruelty, the flip side of the hearty frontiersman that has given politicians stiffies for over a century. Parents visit it on children who grow up and visit it on their own. The weak (physically or morally) are judged harshly as are those that associate with them. 

We make our own way out, as unlikely as those routes may be, and none as unlikely as the travels of our hero Lena Grove, but you'll have to finish the book to learn about her.

I am just realizing now that the Faulkner set I own (Oprah's Book Club Edition) is not chronologically arranged, so though I first read As I Lay Dying it evidently came out a year after The Sound and the Fury, which I just finished.

Though I tend toward the more straightforward organization, I can understand why this order was chosen. The themes and style present in As I Lay Dying seem to be deepened and even more present in The Sound and the Fury. Stream of consciousness is common through much of the book and brings us suddenly backwards in time to different scenes talking around the action, bringing description and emotion to paint a picture where a less bold writer might have spelled out the action for us. Difficulty comes along with this structure as, moreso than the previous read, it can drag during the early pages of a new section while you try to acclimate to a new voice.

Early in each of the four sections, but especially the first three, we get the bones the different scenes to which we will return over the next 100 pages or so, but they are fungible and tend to change meaning as we come back and more of the scene emerges. In this way, the information of the plot is insufficient to understanding the story, you have to go through the work of trying to understand the characters, of being pulled this way or that based on what we understand of different events, often to be dropped somewhere else entirely, years down the line with the knowledge of a new character in the next section.

I was more cognizant of symbolism and patterns in this story, though I can think back to some very rich images in As I Lay Dying now that I've caught that line. Most glaringly the narcissus, a broken one at that, Benjy is holding at the end, seeming to represent his house and line in its evocation of narcissism and the way it seems Dilsey and the servants are the ones holding the family together like the twig Luster ties the flower to despite its destructive tendencies.  I return to the sense of rhythm in his writing as well, such as that set in the title, The Sound and the Fury, which finds a response in scenes like that at the Easter service with repetitions of  "the power and the glory" and "the recollection and the blood."

The Compsons, like the Bundrens seem trapped in their own self-interest. Within the family everyone assumes the others are acting directly in response to him- or herself. Jason constantly rails against his niece's behavior as the cause of his woes and a mark on his reputation even as he steals from her, his mother speaks almost exclusively in complaints and speaks of the woes of her children as curses visited upon herself.

Faulkner also appears to be having fun with the Shakespeare quote from which he took the title:

... It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(Macbeth V.5.6-8)

We can start with the fact that the first section is from the perspective of a man with a mental disability. Faulkner is no more simply giving us an idiot to tell the tale than he is setting out to tell a tale signifying nothing, he is brings the passage into the story but plays with it, turns it around, ponders what it means in the context of this family. 

Book Three, the final of the set,  is Light in August. Let me know what I missed about The Sound and the Fury below.

I have started looking into meditation and one of the things every video and article has conveyed is the idea that you are going to fail. A lot. You won't keep your mind clear for more than a second or less, but you shake it off, try again to clear your mind. Lose focus. Start again. Repeat.

It is a feeling I am familiar with.

Unless you really bind yourself, say to one author, you're going to fall behind on reading, and I have this perpetual feeling--especially with the classics, however you define that--that I am catching up, what I am reading now is something I should have read already and so are all those other books people have recommended or I have seen referenced.

Part of that, to be sure, is a fools errand; I read more than most people I know but I can't outpace all of them. There will always be someone who can't believe I haven't read Margaret Atwood yet or Dostoevsky or Proust, or, in this case Faulkner. So I add it to the list and read another book, then repeat. I'll never read them all but that is what's great, reading and learning--one in the same really--are lifelong projects.

Which brings me to Faulkner.

I haven't read him since high school and even then it was a passing look at "A Rose for Emily." I was expecting something pretty or sweet based on the title and intrigued by the strange and morbid tale I got--and maybe pretty in its own way(?) this was a while ago and the twist is about all I remember. He is right up my alley, I love to unpack the more daunting writers, the ones who challenge readers and scare many off, but I've been borrowing a lot recently and my own pile has stayed pretty much as it was a few months ago.

I picked up this three-book set used from the bookshop--where I used to work--in my New Jersey hometown and lieu of making a New Year's Resolution, a famously fruitless venture, I've decided to take the trio on as a project for the first month of 2016.

It is something I have done before and I think it is a good idea, the holiday season has just passed and that's a good chance to ask for a book--if you're as much of a nerd as I am, you're probably getting a few anyway, let people know what you want. There is nothing much going on in January, winter hits its stride in much of the country, there are no holidays until MLK Jr. day, even at movie theaters January is purported to be a place to drop some duds, so settle in with some book with heft that's been languishing on some shelf or list. I've read Don Quixote and Moby Dick in this manner and think I'll make it a tradition.

What books have you been waiting on that would make a good new years project?

This is the most challenging book I’ve read this year. I don’t know how far I would have gotten without Google. This book is amazing, but it’ll sure make you work to understand its amazingness.

The Sound and the Fury is divided in to four chapters, each focusing on a different member of the Compson family.

The first chapter (titled April 7, 1928) is narrated by Benjy. It’s the hardest chapter to understand because Benjy is mentally disabled and has no concept of time. There are flashbacks in the middle of sentences, and it’s nearly impossible to separate what is actually happening from what Benjy is remembering. To make things more confusing, there are a ton of characters, and several of them have the same name. Even though this chapter is challenging, it’s my favorite in the book. Benjy is an interesting narrator because he has a unique perspective. He loves his family (especially his older sister), but he doesn’t understand what is going on around him.

The second chapter (June 2, 1910) is narrated by Benjy’s brother, Quentin. Quentin is a student at Harvard. He’s so upset by his sister’s promiscuity and the deterioration of his family’s reputation that he contemplates suicide. As he becomes more suicidal, his narrative becomes more fragmented and confused.

The third chapter (April 6, 1928) is narrated by another brother, Jason. He’s violent, controlling, and generally a nasty person. He steals money from his own family to buy prostitutes, but he spends his chapter trying to prevent his niece, Miss Quentin, from following in her mother’s promiscuous footsteps.

The final chapter (April 8, 1928) is written in third person. It focuses on Jason and Dilsey, one of the Compson’s servants. In this chapter, Dilsey is struggling to take care of the Compsons and their demands. Meanwhile, Jason is still trying to track down Miss Quentin and her lover. Dilsey is my second-favorite character in the book (after Benjy). I feel bad for her. She has to put up with all of these horrible people.

On the surface, it seems like this book is about three brothers’ unhealthy obsession with the sex lives of their female family members. It is about that, but it’s also about an obsession with time. Benjy doesn’t understand time, so he believes that his whole life has happened in a single moment. Quentin is so caught up in the past that he can’t move on from it. Jason is so focused on the present that he doesn’t think about the consequences of his actions. I love that the characters in this book have such distinct personalities. Each of them has a unique voice and narration style.

The story starts out confusing, but it becomes clearer as the book goes on. Each chapter helps fill in the gaps left by the previous chapters. In the end, it does make sense. The book is a puzzle that I enjoyed solving. Watching the slow disintegration of the Compson family made me feel something, and that’s unusual.

So, if you like challenging books, I’d recommend this one. It’s worth the effort.